


Harrison Unrooted

by drayton



Category: Harrison Squared - Daryl Gregory
Genre: Gen, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:52:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drayton/pseuds/drayton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harrison's trip to get a replacement leg yields unexpected results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harrison Unrooted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts).



San Diego wasn't the same.

Okay, I'll be honest: San Diego was probably the same, but I sure wasn't. Harrison Harrison the Fifth, not-exactly-normal teenager missing one parent and part of a meat leg, had become Harrison Squared, two-time survivor of a bad encounter with the Squid Beast From Beyond, and was now missing a carbon-fiber leg and one-and-a-half parents.

Dad's dead. Mom is... not dead, but not really living, either. Her body inhabits a high-tech hospital bed back in Dunnsmouth, Massachusetts. As near as I can tell, her soul's inhabiting a scrimshaw plate I left in a protective glass case at her bedside.

To other people, the carvings my friend Lub brought up from the Scrimshander's cave are slightly odd and beautifully executed works of art. To me, the carvings are warm to the touch and feel alive. Ever since Dunnsmouth, I've gotten weird feelings. It's not just the scrimshaw. My phantom leg feels cold when monsters are around. Maybe “monsters” isn't the right term, but it's the word I use for strange beings with evil intent.

My not-leg hasn't felt cold at all since returning to San Diego. Either there aren't any monsters here or I'm only tuned to the Dunnsmouth Monster Frequency. And believe me, if it's the latter, I'm not interested in improving my reception.

I came back to San Diego to get a new prosthesis. My body hasn't changed that much since my last leg was made, so ordering the new leg was easy, if expensive. Trying to hook up with my old friends... well, I found myself wishing I'd gone to Boston for the leg, even though that would have meant getting plugged into a new network of doctors and techs.

There's nothing wrong with my old friends. They're great people, funny, and some of them are pretty smart. The problem is that they're unrelentingly normal, and I'm not anymore. Maybe I never was.

One of my old friends, Jason, had a big pizza party at his house the day after I got to California. It should have been a blast. I'd missed these people, this life, so intensely during my first few days in Dunnsmouth. I should have been overjoyed to be part of it again, even if only for an evening. Instead, I felt like the guy who never really gets the joke, but laughs because everyone else is laughing.

While one part of me grinned at the latest uncomplimentary story about Principal Woodard, another part of me noticed that no one was talking with their fingers, except for the hand gesture that everyone knows. A month ago, I'd been one of these kids, sending texts behind the teachers' backs, forwarding links, and complaining about the general unfairness of being imprisoned in high school. Searching for ridiculous videos of some moron pulling a stunt that ended with him getting hit in the nads had been a common pastime. How could I explain to my old friends that the kids at Dunnsmouth Secondary have never seen a YouTube video? That my new best friend is a fish boy who hides from humans? That my mom's soul is in a dinner plate? Suddenly, I felt like the guy in the video, and getting hit in the nads wasn't funny at all.

When I left the party near midnight, I didn't make any promises to visit my friends again before leaving San Diego. “It depends on the leg,” I lied, and left it at that.

Aunt Sel was waiting up for me when I got back to the hotel. I hadn't wanted her to leave Mom's side and she hadn't wanted me to come to California on my own. We'd compromised by doing things her way. That's how life usually works out for her.

“How did it go?” she said, as soon as I came in. Somehow, she'd wangled the best suite in the hotel at a cut-rate price. She looked at me closely, then said, “That bad, huh?”

“There's so much I can't tell them,” I said. “I'm not sure they'd believe me, even if I did. It doesn't matter. We're going back to Massachusetts, anyway.” I'd decided that my best chance for getting Mom back is probably in Dunnsmouth. After explaining _everything_ to Aunt Sel, she'd agreed with me. She'd scarcely blinked when I told her about Lub and the Scrimshander and Urgaleth. Maybe all those years of living in LA had changed her idea of normal. The only thing she'd really struggled with was the revelation that Lydia isn't my girlfriend.

“You want to get back to your mother.”

“Yes,” I said. “I can make a quick trip back here when the leg's ready. How soon can we leave?”

There was the sort of awkward pause that usually means Aunt Sel's about to tell me something I won't like. “Tomorrow,” she said cautiously.

“But...?”

“We need to go to Oregon first.”

“Why?”

“Your grandfather died this morning.”

Harrison Harrison the Third. A ninety-something geezer who'd mistaken me for his dead son the last time we'd spoken on the phone. I hadn't seen him in person since he'd had an epic fight with Mom three years ago. Did I care that he was dead?

I was about to say something snarky when I remembered that HH3 is Aunt Sel's dad. For her sake, at least, I should keep teenage sarcasm to myself.

“I know,” she said. “I didn't always like him, either.”

Leave it to Aunt Sel to play it straight instead of riffing on some handy tips from The Big Book of Adult Bullshit, Chapter Seven: Dealing with Death. I almost laughed out loud. “So,” I said, “when did you like him?”

“Any time I was nowhere near Oregon,” she answered. “Let's go to bed. We can pack in the morning.”

I should have slept soundly. Using crutches and hopping a lot is exhausting, not to mention the energy I'd spent pretending to be a Harrison who no longer existed. Instead, I shifted restlessly in my bed while mentally re-hashing the party. Yes, it had definitely been awkward, and the worst part was that the other kids hadn't twigged to how out-of-place I'd felt. Welcome to San Diego! Try the food. Enjoy the mild weather. Meet the dominant species, _Teenagerus Oblivious_.

Part of me had known this would happen, ever since that day I'd briefly gotten cell reception and realized the life I'd known was slipping away from me. I wasn't San Diego anymore. I wasn't quite Dunnsmouth, either. What was I?

I drifted off while I was still trying to sort out my feelings about the party and HH3's death, and fell into The Dream.

For years, I believed The Dream was nothing more than a weird mishmash of images I'd picked up here and there to express feelings my three-year-old self had no words for. The heaving ocean that claimed my father's life had been real enough, but surely there'd been no tentacles, and no sharp teeth biting off my leg? Now I knew those images were much closer to a true memory than I'd given them credit for.

When I was a little kid, The Dream was overwhelming. As I grew up, my waking self learned how to observe my anger and my sleeping self learned how to observe The Dream. Part of me still feels the terror, but most of me says, Really? Nothing on tonight but reruns? Oh, well, let's grab some popcorn and watch this bad boy.

It began as always, with Dad and me tossing around in a storm-racked ocean. Observer Me knew that Mom and the overturned boat must be nearby, but for the moment my attention was focused on the searing pain in my leg and my father's face.

“No!” he roared, while struggling to pull me up as the thing with sharp teeth tried to yank me down. “He'll drown!”

Observer Me blinked. I'd never heard Dad's voice before. A crack of thunder obscured his next words, and before I could hear anything else, he was flinging me away from him, and I saw another discrepancy. Always before, when he'd tossed me towards safety, he'd been throwing my three-year-old body. This time, I saw my sixteen-year-old self go flying through the air.

I looked back towards Dad. I always look, even though I know what will happen, even though I really don't want to see the tentacle wrap around his body and drag him down. This time, as I looked back, Dad said, “I'm sorry,” before disappearing beneath the waves.

I woke, chest heaving, covered in a cold sweat. Where had _that_ come from?

It took several minutes for my pulse to slow to normal. My stomach was churning uneasily, and I wasn't sure whether the problem was fear or too much pizza. What had just happened? I'd had that nightmare hundreds of times. Why should a little twist on it bother me so much?

Dry-mouthed, I ran over the details again in my head. Me, Dad, ocean, check. Tug of war with the Blood Pilot, check. Dad shouting... huh? I pressed at my memories, trying to recall whether I'd ever even _seen_ Dad shouting anything other than my name, let alone having heard him... nope. Why now, and why was it so scary?

Questions that had been rumbling around in the back of my head coalesced into one big ugly. Lydia had returned the scrimshaw to the families of their subjects. None of them had lost a relative to the Dunnsmouth Disease thirteen years ago, when I lost my leg. There weren't any records of people dying or going missing in nearby towns around that time, either. Who was supposed to have been the host for the Blood Pilot on the night Dad died?

Aunt Sel didn't know why Mom and Dad had taken me out onto the ocean in the middle of the night, during a storm. Professor Freytag had told me the scriptures referred to using a child, as young as possible, for the host. What if, “No! He'll drown!” hadn't been Dad crying out to Mom, or to the universe? What if he'd been trying to warn the Blood Pilot it was on the verge of killing its new host?

I'd always believed Dad saved me that night. Now, I didn't know. I didn't know whether the new version of The Dream was real, or just a reflection of my fears. And I didn't know how or where I could discover the truth.

I spent the next hour telling myself I was leaping to absurd conclusions, that in the light of day I'd laugh at myself for being so paranoid over a silly dream. Sometime after three, I drifted off again, but when Aunt Sel woke me at eight, my doubts were still there.

 

Our trip to Portland was quiet, in every sense of the word. My phantom leg stayed at room temperature, there was no air turbulence, and Aunt Sel and I barely said ten words to each other. I guess I wasn't the only one trying to make sense of the past.

“Do you have keys for Grandpa's house?” I asked, in a pathetic attempt to make conversation.

“No, but we won't need them. I hired a live-in caretaker for him almost two years ago. She's the one who called me. In any case, we won't be staying there. We've got reservations at a hotel.”

So she didn't want to stay in his house. Yeah, feelings about the old man must definitely be complicated.

When we got to the hotel, Aunt Sel didn't even bother going into a diva routine, which was something of a disappointment. I've gotten to the point where I find them entertaining, as long as they aren't directed at me. She simply said, “We have a reservation for a suite,” and left it at that.

The rest of our day was swallowed up by a series of phone calls: to Grandpa's lawyers, to a funeral home, to his caretaker, to the nurses taking care of Mom, to Saleem, to Lydia.

“Let's be spontaneous,” Aunt Sel said airily, after I'd finished talking to Lydia. “Let's take the cablecar and hop off at the first restaurant that looks good. We'll compare notes over dinner.”

Clearly, she was perking up, as she'd put on a new outfit and a lot more make-up while I'd been on the phone. Diva Sel, reporting for duty. I haven't decided whether Aunt Sel's diva moments are things she does when she's feeing in control or things she does when she wants to feel in control. Maybe both.

Given her mood, I thought she'd be attracted to something fancy, but we ended up in the back room of a Vietnamese restaurant so tiny I was surprised it had a back room. Over dinner, we planned the next day's activities.

“I've spoken to the lawyers. We have an appointment tomorrow afternoon, to discuss the terms of the will.”

“What about the funeral?” I asked, wondering who would come. If Grandpa had been as cranky with other people as he'd been with his family, maybe no one.

“Dad made arrangements ages ago. No services, and no fancy caskets. He was cremated today.”

“That was quick,” I said, in surprise.

“There wasn't any reason to wait, since there wasn't going to be a service. Did you want one?” she said, looking at me intently. “We can always do something private, if it's important to you.”

Was it? “No,” I said, after thinking about it. “It's just that things are moving faster than I thought they would. What about his house?”

“He left it to me. I don't want it, or anything in it, except some family photos. Since it's mine to dispose of, I'll hire someone to auction the contents and sell it.”

“So there's no need to stay,” I said, feeling conflicted. To be honest, I wanted to be back in Dunnsmouth this very minute, but it seemed weird and sad that someone could die and the rest of the world would move on so quickly. Had it been like this when Dad died?

“What did your girlfriend have to say?” Sel asked.

“She's not my girlfriend. Are you going to be like this about every girl I talk to?”

“Only the ones that like you. What did she have to say?”

I shrugged. “The adults in town are trying to pretend nothing much is happening, but they're clearly worried. Lub is searching the bottom of the bay for the Scrimshander's knife. Maybe there's something special about it, and we can reverse the process if we have it. How about Mom?”

“The nurses say there's no change in Rosa's condition, and Saleem's been handling a few small details for me.”

“What details?” I asked, hoping that Aunt Sel wasn't going to overshare anything about kinky lingerie.

“Buying the rental house.”

“What?”

“Think about it logically,” Aunt Sel said. “Insular village experiences strange event it can't really explain to outsiders.”

“There was nothing weird in the cover story Lydia came up with,” I protested.

“No, there wasn't, and kudos to her. I'm sure the people outside Dunnsmouth don't know what really happened, but some of the people inside Dunnsmouth do. They won't want any outsiders poking around.”

“So toss the weirdos from California out of the rental house and they'll leave town,” I concluded.

“Yes, but they can't do that now. Score one for the California weirdos,” she said, and we clinked glasses.

 

The following morning, we rented a car and drove out to Grandpa's house to look around. We met Mrs. Blinn, the caretaker, an elderly woman who proved to be as irritable as Grandpa. I wondered if Aunt Sel had hired her on purpose, hoping to make a love match. A hate match? She followed me around the house, hmphing at regular intervals and watching me closely.

“See anything you want?” Aunt Sel asked, coming into the room carrying a small box of photographs.

Mrs. Blinn frowned at her as if Sel were carrying off photos of _her_ family. Maybe “pissed off” was her permanent facial expression. Aunt Sel narrowed her eyes, and Mrs. Blinn downgraded The Face of Perpetual Scowling from “pissed off” to “sulky”.

“No,” I said, and Mrs. Blinn treated me to thirty seconds' worth of “affronted” before Aunt Sel announced that we were leaving. _That_ pleased her.

 

Late that afternoon, Aunt Sel and I entered the mausoleum-like offices of Harrison, Pryor, Pryor & Black. I'm not sure why Grandpa's name was still on the door. I guess he'd been too expensive to buy out.

It was the sort of place where the receptionist looks astonished that a teenager would have the nerve to wear jeans within its sacred precincts. By myself, I probably would have languished in the reception area for an hour or more before she grudgingly let me confer with the most junior partner, or maybe only the ampersand. Aunt Sel sized up the situation and gave the receptionist an I'm A Happy Crocodile Because You're My Next Meal grin. Three minutes later, we were sitting in front of the elder Pryor, with refreshments at hand. Pryor looked older than Aunt Sel but a lot younger than Grandpa, and was ruggedly handsome in a way that had Aunt Sel eyeing him speculatively.

After the receptionist, I'd expected to get attitude from Pryor, but he was pleasant, if business-like. After offering his condolences, he got down to explaining the terms of Grandpa's will.

“As we discussed yesterday, the house and its contents will be yours,” he told Aunt Sel. “There are a number of modest bequests, but the bulk of the estate will be divided evenly between Harrison's heirs.”

I flinched internally at hearing my name, but Aunt Sel said, “The two of us?” blankly, as if Grandpa had fifty bastards stashed away somewhere. Why was she playing dumb? The past few weeks had shown me that Aunt Sel is anything but dumb.

Pryor smiled at her tolerantly. “Yes. With some conditions.” He turned to me and said, “For the time being, your inheritance will be held in trust. Reasonable expenditures for your living expenses and education will of course be covered. Half of your inheritance will come to you on your twenty-first birthday. The rest will come to you at the age of fifty, provided you have named your first legitimate son Harrison.”

“What if I don't have a son?” I said.

“That portion of your inheritance will pass to your aunt and her heirs. There is one further condition: You are not to reside in, or come within fifty miles of, the village of Dunnsmouth, Massachusetts, at any time.”

I could feel the anger rising up. Aunt Sel must have sensed it, because she put a restraining hand on my arm. Check it out, Harrison. Isn't that a magnificent eruption developing? It might rival Krakatoa!

Pryor, oblivious, hadn't even looked up from the papers he was reading. “It's a fairly obscure place, but I can provide you with a map detailing the proscribed area. Your grandfather felt the family had experienced enough personal tragedy there, and wanted to keep history from repeating itself. A bit irrational, I'll admit, but this sort of thing is not as unusual as—”

“We know where it is,” I ground out. “We live there.”

Pryor's surprise was so comical that I felt most of my anger drain away. Good. Now that I knew where that rage came from, I _really_ didn't want to have anything to do with it.

Aunt Sel intervened. “Harrison's mother went there a month ago to conduct scientific research. She was badly injured in a boating accident, and is currently lying in a coma. The doctors think it best not to move her to another city.”

I wondered which doctors would have recommended that and concluded it would have been any doctor who wanted to go on working for Aunt Sel. Pryor was opening and closing his mouth without saying anything. Finally, he settled for, “You'll need to move. Almost immediately. Certainly before the will is probated.”

“No,” I said. Hey! Firm, but not angry. Go me!

“Perhaps I was unclear. The entirety of your inheritance depends upon complying with this restriction.”

“Are there any restrictions on my inheritance?” Aunt Sel said sweetly.

“Er, no,” Pryor said, looking mildly embarrassed. “For some reason, Harrison was only concerned with your nephew's safety. He left a request that you scatter his ashes in Dunnsmouth Bay, but I can hire a service if you'd rather not—”

“So my inheritance has no conditions placed on it at all?” she persisted.

“None at all.”

“Then I don't see a problem. Harrison is, of course, my heir. If he chooses to stay in Dunnsmouth, his share will come to me, and I can give it right back to him. Can't I?” She smiled at him like a kid who's just tied his shoelaces for the first time, and is surprised by his success.

“Well, that's true...” Pryor said awkwardly. Clearly, he disapproved of Aunt Sel's manuever, but couldn't find a way to counter it.

“That's settled, then. Anything else?”

“Well... one more thing,” Pryor said grudgingly. He reached down to open a deep drawer in his desk, and withdrew a wooden file box. “Harrison instructed me to pass this on to you,” he said, sliding the box across the desk towards me.

“What's in it?” I asked, picking up the box.

“He never told me. This,” he said, passing me a small sealed envelope, “contains the key.”

If Pryor had expected me to open the box in front of him, he was disappointed. Aunt Sel was effusively thanking him for his time before the envelope reached my hand.

“Such a full day,” Aunt Sel remarked in an overly bright tone, as we were ushered out of Pryor's office. She was deliberately filling the air with small talk to prevent anything of consequence being said. Did she know what was in the box? Was there some reason I shouldn't ask?

As soon as we left the building, I turned to her. “What was that about? You went all beauty contestant on me. I thought you were going to start talking about world peace.”

“My dear, when you are a fashionably-dressed woman—and I _am_ a fashionably-dressed woman—it's amazing how many people are willing to believe that the only thoughts you can keep in your head are about what the hot colors are this season. Why not... _nurture_ that belief, if it helps things along?”

“So do you know what's in here?” I said, hefting the box.

“No idea. But if Dad had wanted his partner to know what it was, he would have told him.”

 

I was feeling pretty wiped by the time we got back to the hotel. “So, what next?” I said. “Is there anything else to do here?”

“No. We should get back to Rosa. The nurses are good, but I'm sure you'd rather be there than here.”

“But the house—” I said.

“Mrs. Blinn can look after it until the time comes to sell it. I gave her six months' salary, and that's on top of the annuity Dad left her. I'll look into some flights for us,” she said, sighing deeply, “later. Right now, I'm exhausted. I think I'll take this,” she said, hoisting a bottle of wine, “and make friends with the soaking tub in my bath. Go ahead and order room service if you get hungry before I come back. I don't have enough energy to go out tonight.”

After she left, I decided to open the box the lawyer had given me. I wasn't sure what to expect. Official documents? True confessions? Treasure maps?

It turned out to be a strange mixture of all three. On the top, I found a variety of birth, death, and marriage certificates, accompanied by a genealogical tree of the Harrison family. Beneath that was a map of the coastline around Dunnsmouth. I found myself wondering whether all the family documents had been on top to provide a layer of boring material before things started getting strange. Below the map of Dunnsmouth, I found the things Grandpa had probably been trying to hide from curious legal clerks: a small cache of battered diaries lying underneath a folded nest of papers, sealed with ribbon and wax, labeled “To Harrison Harrison IV.”

I broke the seal on the papers meant for my father, and began reading. It was a letter, handwritten by Grandpa shortly after my father's birth, and its contents rocked me.

Grandpa began by sending greetings to his infant son. The first part of the letter contained a summary of the diaries in the bottom of the box, and almost immediately, I found an answer to one of the little questions that had been niggling at me. I'd wondered how the diary of Tobias Gluck had come to be in Dunnsmouth. From the diary, it was clear he'd been there and had had a narrow escape from the Scrimshander in 1832. It was just as clear, though, that he'd made it safely back to his ship.

Apparently, life had never been the same for Tobias after Dunnsmouth. His shipmates had blamed him for the disappearance and presumed death of his friend, George. Tobias had drifted from ship to ship, trying to escape the whispers. In 1839, he'd resolved to go back and confront the evil thing that had taken George. After spending a year in Maine learning how to be a lobsterman, he'd returned to Dunnsmouth. No one connected the taciturn stranger named Harrison Harrison with a sailor who'd been there briefly several years earlier.

Harrison began as a lobsterman working for Halgrim Ericsson but within a few seasons had his own boat, a wife, and an infant son named Thomas. From time to time, he heard the villagers reference “the Scrimshander” and was careful not to react with more than polite interest. He'd quickly learned that even the most innocent-seeming questions could yield strange answers. He'd once asked Halgrim about the Great September Gale of 1815, an event still widely mentioned, and had received an urgent warning “not to bend the ways of the world.” Despite the warning, he gathered information where he could, trying to determine the exact location of the Scrimshander's cave.

I looked over at the pile of diaries. Somewhere in there, the first Harrison Harrison had recorded everything he knew about Dunnsmouth and the Scrimshander. Perhaps he'd learned something that would help me.

According to Grandpa, HH1's last diary entry ended abruptly in 1846, after several entries mentioning that the villagers' behavior was becoming increasingly odd. Eleven years later, his son Thomas took over the diary with the brief notation that Harrison Harrison had disappeared and been discovered “with body intact but devoid of sense” a few weeks later. Thomas Harrison, having read all of his father's secrets, resolved to someday name a son Harrison Harrison II, to honor his father's quest.

Thomas Harrison had kept his word. He'd also had the sense to move to Boston, where he'd become a successful attorney and well-respected judge. His son, Harrison Harrison the Second, stayed away from Dunnsmouth for most of his life. In 1932, HH2 embarked on a long business trip to Manchester. No one knew what made him decide to detour through Dunnsmouth that September, but he did. After weeks of frantic searching, a grief-stricken Thomas, now nearing ninety, had borne his son's vacant-eyed body back to Boston. The doctors called it an unusual presentation of polio, but Thomas Harrison knew it was the Dunnsmouth Disease, and vowed that no Harrison would come to grief in Dunnsmouth, ever again.

And so it had passed down the generations: Name your son Harrison. Fight evil. Stay the hell away from Dunnsmouth.

Skipping ahead, I could see that Grandpa hadn't followed those strictures. In the fall of 1942, Harrison Harrison the Third, age twenty-two, and his nineteen-year-old brother Charlie had decided to see what this Dunnsmouth was all about before shipping out for North Africa. HH3 survived North Africa and Sicily and the final push into Germany. Charlie never made it to basic training.

At first glance, Dunnsmouth had seemed like any other seaside village scattered along the New England coast. The people looked a bit odd, but HH3 put that down to inbreeding. That night, he and Charlie got drunk and decided it would be a fine idea to “borrow” a boat and take it out onto the water. After all, in a few months they'd be taking a long voyage by ocean to fight Hitler. How much evil could really be lurking in the water of Dunnsmouth Bay?

At this point in the story, Grandpa's handwriting became uneven and a few words were blurred, as if tears had splotched the paper. He and Charlie had set out, well-supplied with liquor and patriotic songs. The water in the bay was choppy but manageable, then the worst storm he'd ever seen sprang up out of nowhere. He struggled to steer the boat back to shore, but the current kept dragging them out to sea and the storm was so thick he could no longer see the lighthouse. Out of nowhere, an enormous tentacle snaked out of the water and snatched Charlie as the boat capsized. Grandpa never saw him again.

“Is there not enough tragedy in this family?” Grandpa had asked me. He'd lost his father and his brother in Dunnsmouth. After the war, he'd gone to Oregon, to get as far away from Dunnsmouth as possible. He'd written a long letter to his son, to tell his family's story and persuade him never to go to Massachusetts. Why had he kept the letter, unopened?

Perhaps Grandpa had thought back to his own youth, and reasoned that making Dunnsmouth sound mysterious would make it more appealing, not less. His will had merely stated that too much family tragedy had already taken place in Dunnsmouth, and left it at that. Perhaps he'd thought that making all the deaths sound like unremarkable boating accidents would be enough to make Dad leave it alone.

Oh, Grandpa, I thought. Harrisons have never been good at leaving things alone. Dad hadn't listened, and Grandpa had lost him, too. Was that what Grandpa and Mom had fought about three years ago? Had she told him she was preparing to return to the site of Dad's death?

I sat back, breathing heavily, and realized that Aunt Sel was sitting across from me. “How long have you been there?” I said in alarm.

“A few minutes. You must have found something pretty serious.”

“You tell me,” I said, and passed her the letter.

She read it with growing concern, occasionally looking up at me with widened eyes. “Well,” she said several minutes later, “that's a hell of a lot more family history than anyone ever bothered to tell me.”

“That Christmas,” I said, “the morning you sent me to fetch a glass of wine. What were Mom and Grandpa fighting about?”

“You, of course,” she said. “Why do you think I sent you for the wine? Even I'm not that big a lush.”

“And you tipped me ten dollars to make me angry.”

“I'm good at distractions,” she said, smirking.

“Mom intended to go to Dunnsmouth,” I said. “Even then.”

“Even then. I didn't know all of this,” she said, gesturing with the letter, “but I assumed Dad was against the idea because of what happened to Harry. When he said, 'That place is cursed,' I knew the conversation was about to go off the rails. Hardly surprising, considering what your dad's body looked like when we got it back.”

“We got it back? Why doesn't anybody ever tell me anything? I thought he just went down and never came up again.”

“No. It washed ashore the following morning, all cut up. His arms... there wasn't much left of them.”

Aunt Sel's eyes were full of pain, and I mentally kicked myself for dredging up bad memories, but I had to know. “Cut—or bitten?” I asked.

“Bitten.”

“He was trying to save me,” I said softly.

“Your grandfather? Yes, he was, in his own bad-tempered way.”

Not Grandpa, I thought. Dad. Dad was trying to save me. He must have fought the Blood Pilot after he'd tossed me. Otherwise, how had his arms become so damaged, and how had I escaped?

There are a lot of things in the ocean with sharp teeth, the nasty part of my brain said, but then I thought, No. Harrisons fight evil. We may suck at it, but we fight evil. The Dream had only been a dream. Impressions, not a flawless video recording. If the three-year-old me had seen the Blood Pilot fighting with Dad, ripping up his arms, I must have edited it out because it was too horrible to remember.

“You still in there?” Aunt Sel said.

“Yeah.”

“What do you want to do next?”

I stared at Aunt Sel in surprise, before her solemn expression and the things we'd just learned caught up with me.  My father, great-uncle, great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather had all come to grief in Dunnsmouth.  The only male Harrisons (Glucks?) who'd survived were the ones who'd avoided Dunnsmouth, and their lives had still been scarred by it.  Even with the Scrimshander gone, I was maybe signing up for a one-way trip to an early grave, and taking Sel along for the ride.  But how much could I hope to learn if we didn't return to Dunnsmouth?

I took a deep breath, and said, “Go back to Mom. See if we can fix her. There may be something in these old diaries we can use.” I hesitated, before adding, “You don't have to come along. I can manage.”

“Don't be stupid. We're in this together. What do you want to do about your inheritance?”

“I think I could live with naming a kid H-squared. But anyone who thinks they're going to keep me away from Dunnsmouth can bite me.”

  



End file.
